Trump and his do-nothing Republicans face 'one big, beautiful' bust of a budget | Opinion
Republicans have decided to take up Trump's challenge of creating one 'big, beautiful bill' and are learning it's harder than it sounds.
Imagine feeling the political pinch being experienced by U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican desperately seeking consensus in his own caucus amid federal budget battles between moderates who want to protect Medicaid and far-right conservatives eager to slash social safety net programs.
Now add to that political dysfunction President Donald Trump, who both wants congressional Republicans to follow his lead when it comes to the federal budget and tax cuts, but also can't clearly define what that looks like.
Consider Trump's May 9 social media pronouncement – where he used 81 words to publicly take both sides on the question of whether America's wealthiest people should pay more in taxes.
Does Trump want higher taxes on the rich or not?
Trump, of course, started off with a complaint, casting himself as a victim who would "graciously accept" a tax increase while predicting that Democrats will skewer him for it. He closed with this: "Republicans should probably not do it, but I'm OK if they do!!!"
All that comes after Trump declared in late April that tax increases for the wealthy were not an option.
Clear now? Trump wants this. Except not really. Except, he'd be OK with it either way. Now go draw up a budget.
That's what passes these days for marching orders in Congress, for a Republican Party that has surrendered its constitutional role as a coequal branch of government in compliant service to a prevaricating president. And all this plays out as Trump's approval rating tanks, diminishing his political capital at home due to his disastrous trade wars with America's allies.
Democrats, sidelined in the minority in both the House and Senate, are limited to crying foul in public forums where many Republicans dare not tread.
As little as that is, it might be a winning strategy for Democrats the 2026 midterm elections.
Republican plan to help the rich would cost millions of Americans their health care
Trump won a second term in 2024 while promising to extend his 2017 tax cut package, set to expire at the end of this year. Those tax cuts benefited wealthy Americans far more than the middle class.
Because, of course, they did. Trump won the presidency the first time while bragging about not paying taxes.
He has been pushing the House and Senate to accomplish that in "one big, beautiful bill," using a parliamentary procedure called "reconciliation" to avoid the potential for Democrats to block his plans in the Senate with a filibuster.
But Republican legislators have been fighting since before his inauguration about how to accomplish that.
Extending Trump's 2017 tax cuts would cost America about $4.5 trillion in the next 10 years. So Republicans eager to go that route have to find places to cut away at the federal budget. That's why they've been circling Medicaid, which provides health insurance to more than 70 million low-income Americans.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, in a May 7 report, examined five potential scenarios for trimming Medicaid and found that they would result in a loss of health insurance for 2.3 million to 8.6 million Americans.
Republicans did the math and calculated midterm election reprisals from angered Americans. Democrats saw that, too, and hit the road, holding town hall meetings in congressional swing districts around the country, where they are painting Republicans as pulling health care from the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich.
Republicans, Democrats know what's at stake: midterms
The midterms are still more than 17 months away. But the parties are already slugging it out, as if those elections were just around the corner. The website Punchbowl News on April 24 reported on Democratic ad campaigns hammering Republicans about Medicaid. Republican allies responded in May with their own campaign ads.
Trump has seen this movie before. He took office in 2017 with Republicans controlling the House and Senate. Voters handed control of the House back to Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections, which gave Trump's political rivals the power and platform to scrutinize his presidency in ways he often found enraging.
That looms large for Trump again, as he waits for congressional leaders, especially the House speaker, to produce a plan. Johnson had hoped the details for the House budget proposal would be hammered out by May 9 so that it could be passed in his chamber by Memorial Day. That's just in two weeks.
Johnson has also been bleeding political capital all along the process. According to Politico, he told hard-right conservatives in his caucus that they could oust him as speaker if he didn't find a minimum of $1.5 trillion in budget cuts for the next decade.
Democrats in 2024 saved Johnson's job as speaker after he was targeted by the far right in his caucus. I don't see that kind of Democratic lifeline getting extended now.
Republican dysfunction is the best hope for saving America's safety net programs like Medicaid, and for the Democrats seeking control of the House, the Senate or both.
Follow Paste BN columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByCrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.